Great link — this story was all I talked about at dinner tonight, as I slurped tea and feasted on Mongolian lamb and chinese eggplant. (I took the exhortation to explore cultural cuisines to heart.)

But I have to say, Matt — it’s bad form to give your blog post the same title as the essay you link to. Especially when there are so many delicious phrases of Pollan’s to choose from. If I’d been first to this link, I would have definitely titled my post “Deep In the Soul Of a Carrot.”

A great essay. Of course, it could also have been entitled, “Eat like a Berkeleyan.” 😉

Two points that raised the hum on my internal skepticism meter: 1) Pollan seems to pin his valuation of “traditional” cuisine on a kind of evolutionary validation. But evolution, of course, only cares about what keeps you alive long enough to mate and see your children through to self-sufficiency. It only cares about keeping you alive after that in as much as your being alive contributes further to the progeny. We, on the other hand, value our lives and health beyond their contribution to our ability to procreate, so evolutionary success isn’t always the best metric, necessarily.

2) Whenever people talk about the French Paradox, I always want to scream-Five f—ing weeks of vacation people!. FIVE.. Who nees fiber when you’ve got that much vacation??